Danusha Laméris offers us a book of losses. "I've buried a lover, a brother, a son," she tells us early on. But loss is only the starting point. Following the trail of poets such as Ellen Bass and Dorianne Laux, Laméris explores a woman's experience, shaping its timeless (and often neglected) mysteries into song. read more

How to Be Perfect, An Illustrated Guide
Ron Padgett, pictures by Jason Novak

reviewed by G.P. Skratz

Ron Padgett is one of the most playful of the playful New York School poets, & Jason Novak's work has graced the pages of The New Yorker, The Paris Review, & other sturdy venues. They have produced a frightening book to review: if one judges it, one doesn't really "get" it. read more

Obliterations
Erasures from The New York Times
Heather Aimee O'Neill and Jessica Piazza

reviewed by Peggy Dobreer

When I received Obliterations in the mail, I was immediately struck by its visual elegance and cover detail, an abundance of clear white space out of which every other element leapt. And those elements? All of New York represented in the soft confines of an enormous block letter "O." read more

The Market Wonders
Susan Briante

reviewed by Richard Silberg

Eco-poetics, referring to the growing body of work addressed to our fevered planet—as opposed to the perennial 'nature poetry'—is probably a twenty-first century term. But recently I've been noting another kind of eco-poetry, writing that chews over, not the ecology but the economy. read more

The Occasionist
Curt Anderson

reviewed by Lee Rossi

Lately I've been asking myself what the contemporary poetry audience is looking for. Time was when all a poet needed was a little solas and a bit of sentence to edify a reader. These days the audience for poetry, such as it is, is much more various. read more

Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin
Philip Cushway and Michael Warr, editors

reviewed by George Higgins

Given the most recent shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana, Philando Castile in Minnesota and five police officers in Dallas, Texas, the release of the new Norton anthology Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, could, sadly, not be more timely. The book purports to collect the very best protest poetry being written by African Americans today. read more

Tilting Point
Peter Dale Scott

reviewed by David Shaddock

In the opening poem of his collection Tilting Point, Peter Dale Scott writes, "I…have spent my years/ building structures for that dawn// each poem a conduit/ from our irreplaceable present// to a glimpse of odyssey/ towards a promised land." The poem and the book that follows is simultaneously an invitation to embark on such an odyssey—toward spiritual renewal and political enlightenment—and a lament for its seeming impossibility for "…a tribe// who have lost faith in themselves." read more

E.E. Cummings: A Life
Susan Cheever

reviewed by Carl Landauer

Susan Cheever's biography of E.E. Cummings provides a sprightly account of the life of one of the twentieth-century's major poets…one of the delights of Cheever's book is her opening, describing her experience with her father, John Cheever, picking up Cummings in their car and driving him from a reading at her Westchester private school to his home in Greenwich Village with a stop for burgers at White Castle. read more

The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems
Larry Levis

reviewed by Terry Lucas

If one is familiar with Elegy, Larry Levis' first posthumously published book of poems, edited by Philip Levine with help from Peter Everwine and David St. John, one does not have to read too many poems from The Darkening Trapeze to realize that the poems David St. John was left to work with for this second posthumously published collection use much of the same imagery and diction. read more

This Present Moment
Gary Snyder

reviewed by Richard Silberg

Gary Snyder is often, maybe even usually, thought of as a Beat poet. That's a label he rejects. The faux-grouping is easy to understand. He was one of the five readers at the famous Six Gallery reading when Ginsberg debuted Howl. read more

Dementia, My Darling
Brendan Constantine

reviewed by Peggy Dobreer

How I love the verse and magic that is Brendan Constantine. But to rave where it is not earned is useless, and I'd owe it to him to say so if I thought it was crap. So please believe me aficionados and newbies, when I tell you that Dementia, My Darling is this poet's finest work yet. read more

The Poetry Deal
Diane di Prima

reviewed by Bruce Isaacson

"Beat" is perhaps the last acknowledged poetry movement to create a broad cultural impact on Western society—it's mores, politics, the ways we relate to one another, the ways we relate to ourselves in the mirror. Diane di Prima is one of a few seminal Beat poets. In her first new book of poetry in decades, here is a major poet working at the peak of her powers. read more

The Crow and I
Neeli Cherkovski

reviewed by Anthony Zedan

I wish Neeli Cherkovski had decided to name his collection after the full title of the poem "When the Crow and I are Alone," rather than The Crow and I, but I understand the poetic urge to compress much meaning in few words. The Crow and I expresses and respects the metaphoric interchangeability and equivalency of these two entities. read more

John Shoptaw's first book of poems, Times Beach, won the 2016 Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and he has read from his work at the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in Berkeley. Composed over a dozen years, his book explores the Mississippi River watershed from Lake Itasca to New Orleans, and dwells on the floodplain of his southeast Missouri—his river-heated radiators, the drainage ditch where he was baptized, the aftershocks of a series of earthquakes that in 1812 "thrust swamps up to steam their last steam." But Shoptaw's long poem is no pastoral, no nostalgic idyll. read more

Remembrance

Photo by Gerald Nicosia.

Jack Mueller, Judith, and baby Cristina in the basement of City Lights, after a reading in January 1982. Jack deliberately posed the family in front of that painted sign, "Born in Sin and Shapen in Iniquity." They said it came from the time when City Lights' basement had housed a church. For Jack, I think, it was a kind of inside joke, sort of carrying on our old Vesuvio's argument over "Don't give me God, don't give me grammar!"

Jack Mueller: Still Solid in the MysteryAmor Fati: New and Selected Poemsreviewed by Gerald Nicosia

…there are other poets who decide early on that they want to spend their lives making better poetry every day, and that the chase of fame will only get in their way, so they put it completely out of mind and instead work on figuring out ways to stay alive while they're making their poetry. Jack Mueller was the latter kind of poet; and in that regard, he was the most remarkable non-famous poet I've ever known. read more

About Chana Bloch (1940-2017)by Richard Silberg

Chana Bloch met the cancer that eventually took her life in the kind of gut to heart to brain honesty with which she met everything else. Her new book of poems, The Moon is Almost Full, has just been published. Three memorials are coming up. read more

Interview

And Then There Was a Revolution
An Interview with Nancy Morejón by Kathleen Weaver

Nancy Morejón is a renowned Cuban poet as well as a critic, translator and cultural worker. She is the author of many volumes of poetry, including translations into English such as Looking Within/Mirar adentro (Selected poems 1954-2000) edited by Juanamaría Cordones-Cook. A recently published selection is Homing Instincts, translated by Pamela Carmell, Cubana Books, 2014. Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejón, Black Scholar Press, appeared in 1985, translated by Kathleen Weaver. read more

Nancy Morejón
From Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing:
Selected PoetryTranslated by Kathleen Weaver read poems

Tribute

David Meltzer reading in February 2016. Video by Esy Casey.

A Few Notes On David Meltzer
Visionary With Red-Hot Coins (1936-2016)by Jack Foley

I wrote my first poem at eleven. It came through me and out of me, a combination of vision and transmission. Maybe "trance-mission" would be more accurate. I was in the center of its energy like a glass or lens where words not light come through.

As a new poet-teacher for California Poets in the Schools in 2014, I found myself in need of lesson plans. Luckily for me, CPitS's Poetry Crossing: 50+ Lessons for 50 Years had just been published. My copy is highlighted in pink, yellow and blue, and marked with pen and Post-It notes. read more

Features

"When the poem finishes itself"
An Interview with Miles Championby Jeffrey P. Beck

Miles Champion is a poet and author of How to Laugh, Eventually, and Compositional Bonbons Placate. Born in Nottingham, England, Miles grew up in South Wales and moved to New York in his thirties. He now lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. He recently collaborated with painter Trevor Winkfield on the book-length illustrated interview How I Became a Painter, and edited a selection of Tom Raworth's poetry, As When. read more

Geometry of Air
The Poetry of Ulalume González de León by Terry Ehret

I discovered Mexican poet Ulalume González de León in the fall of 1982 as one of thirty-odd students in Frances Mayes's very first graduate workshop on the prose poem at San Francisco State. Our text, Michael Benedikt's The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, featured a long prose poem in fifteen parts, "Anatomy of Love." I was instantly enthralled by the language: a richly erotic imagery blending anatomical and scientific vocabulary in an unconventional syntax. read more

African-American poet Adrian Matejka's first book, The Devil's Garden, won the 2002 New York/New England Award from Alice James Books. His second, Mixology, was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His most recent book, The Big Smoke, a series of poems about the black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. read more

At the Prison a Steel Cage Opensby Rose Black

Today will be my first visit to Salinas Valley State Prison
(SVSP), where I'm to observe Nancy Gomez teach the poetry workshop started by prison psychologist Ben Bloch and poet Ellen Bass. If I choose to commit, I will be joining the teaching team soon. read more

Interviews

Portrait of Joseph Stroud by Jack Richard Smith.

Riding the Dragon
An Interview with Joseph Stroud by Barbara March

Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Of This World, New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), which won the 2010 San Francisco Poetry Center Award for an outstanding book of poetry by an American poet. The occasion for this interview was his receipt of the prestigious 2014 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. He divides his time between Santa Cruz, California, and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. read more